Al-Qaida's new leader has sought to claim credit for this year's Arab uprisings, in a message marking the September 11 anniversary.

Ayman al-Zawahiri said the 2001 attacks on the US paved the way for the "Arab volcano" sweeping the region a decade later.

"By striking the head of the world criminal," al-Qaida had forced America to press its allies in the Middle East to change their policies, which helped the volcano to build up and explode, Zawahiri said in the hour-long audio message.

He criticised the US for what he called "blatant deception" in showing support for the Arab uprisings while keeping strong ties with leaders in the absolute monarchies of the Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia.

"Why doesn't it [the US] say anything to al-Saud, the killers of Muslims and the thieves of their wealth," he said, referring to the Saudi ruling family.

The message, released by al-Qaida's media arm and posted on extremist websites, included previously unreleased footage of Osama bin Laden.

Zawahiri and other al-Qaida figures have issued a number of messages seeking to associate themselves with the Arab uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In the messages they urge Arabs to replace toppled regimes with Islamic rule.

The wave of unrest in the Middle East, however, was largely the work of young, peaceful protesters seeking democratic freedoms, and political observers say it showed the failure of al-Qaida's extremist ideology and how out of touch the terror group is with Arab youth.

Zawahiri was Bin Laden's deputy and became head of al-Qaida in June after his predecessor's death the previous month. He had a long history of fighting against Hosni Mubarak's rule in his native Egypt, leading militants who carried out deadly bombing and shooting attacks in the 1990s.

Islamic militants considered the regimes of Mubarak and other US-allied autocrats in the Middle East to be corrupt, godless and too closely aligned with the west. Their attacks were met with a crackdown by Mubarak's security forces that largely crushed their operations in Egypt.